Welcome to ADA Historical

ADA Historical provides the home for Australian historical and colonial census materials from 1834 through to the current day. These census data holdings are in two collections: the Historical Census and Colonial Data Archive, and ABS census table data from 1966 to the present.

Historical Census and Colonial Data Archive (1834 - 1901)

ADA Historical provides the home for the Historical and Colonial Census Data Archive, a digitised version of the colonial census statistics from the various British colonies that eventually became the Commonwealth of Australia, for the period 1834 to 1901. The HCCDA corpus includes 18,638 pages of text, 208 maps, and approximately 15000 tables, covering all of the Australian colonies up to the time of Australian federation.

ABS Census Data (1966 onwards)

ADA Historical provides access to aggregate data files, including tables from the Australian population censuses from 1966 onwards, on behalf of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Explore the ABS Census page for an overview of this collection.

Historical Time Series

Along with census data, ADA Historical provides a home for time series data from the ADA collection of historical interest. Series include Household and Family Formation in 19th Century Tasmania, South Australian Naturalisation records for 1837-1870, and Economic and Social Statistics collection for 1900-1980. Explore the ADA Historical Catalogue to see more.